


A Ghost's Embrace

by AceQueenKing



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alderaan, Force Ghosts, Force-Sensitive Shmi Skywalker, Gen, Ghosts, Jedha, Tatooine, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:44:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: Shmi Skywalker watches over her granddaughter, but she isn't alone.





	A Ghost's Embrace

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [StarWarsMothersDayPromptFest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/StarWarsMothersDayPromptFest) collection. 



Shmi was born in sand, and sometimes, she almost missed it.

Jedha was nothing like Tatooine – cold where Tatooine was blisteringly hot, peaceful while Tatooine was, at best chaotic – but it looked much the same, on the surface. When she closed her eyes, she could see Jedha still, could center herself enough to feel the coldness on her breath and almost see the monks that had been her closest family before — well, _before_.  That sort of meditation required time, and Shmi rarely had a moment when Watto wasn't berating her, or when Anakin didn’t need tending — and as such, meditation happened rarely in her life.

But still, it was enough to soothe the ache. It wasn’t as if she could go  _back_.

She missed Jedha, but missed it more for Anakin than herself. Anakin was _special_ , his birth proof of that — but though he was born on Jedha, he did not remember it. He did not have a place of calmness within him, a place he could return to center himself. She tried to instruct him, but when he went with the Jedi, there was a part of her that was relieved. If he could not find calm in the Republic, in the _capital_ of the Republic, then he would not be able to find it anywhere. Still, she missed him, and he was the ghost upon her waking life, his absence as much a presence as he himself once had been. She felt always she could almost see him out of the corner of her eyes, felt as if she would see him again, if only because this, more than anything, was her last wish.

And this last wish came true, if not in a way either of them could have predicted.

When she next awoke, she was in a place she had never seen.

—

Alderaan was _indescribably_ beautiful.

Not like Jedha, nor Tatooine. Mountains and wide, spanning seas; plains with glorious wheat that swayed under the window of the little infant girl she watched over.

Her _granddaughter_.

The child burbled in her crib, oblivious to the two dead women who watched her. Shmi did not know how she got there; the other woman – like her, dark-haired, heavy-eyed, laden with regret – it was obvious, knew equally little. Wetnurses and servants and the woman the little girl would one day call _mama_ flittered about her, anxiously attending to her every need while simultaneously ignoring the two ghosts who stayed at the girl’s side. Mostly.

 The other ghost came in fits and spurts, blinking through time, unable to speak and seemingly there through sheer force of will. Shmi had retained her mindfulness, enough that she was able to piece together who the other woman was: her granddaughter’s _mother_. How Shmi’s heart broke at that, to be isolated from Anakin but to know that, wherever he was, he was alone. She wished she could find him but she had never learned enough to follow anything but the will of the universe, and besides, she could never abandon the girl, not any more than her mother could. She could not feel Anakin anymore, nor the hot suns of Tatooine's burning stars, nor the cold rocks she had laid upon in Jedha. 

The baby choked on her own spittle; the other woman opened her mouth but no sound came out. Shmi concentrated hard on the girl’s adopted mother, and the woman, finally, came coming, picking up the baby and helping her, clearing the mucus from her mouth. It was easier to understand the living than her fellow dead; the woman at her side, she knew, would remain a mystery. But Leia, this infant, she understood as well as the rocks, as the sand. 

The other ghost turned toward her and smiled. Shmi wished she knew her name.

—

Time passed oddly for the dead.

Leia grew in fits and spurts in Shmi’s ethereal consciousness, going for infant to toddler to child in the blink of an eye. If Leia saw her ghosts, she gave no sign, but Shmi liked to think they were a comforting presence. Shmi had certainly found friendly spirits so. For what were her fellow slaves, forbidden to silence, if not friendly spirits, their alliances formed in a grueling crucible?

The child shimmered into being before her, sobbing in large, hiccupping gasps as she threw herself onto her bed. Shmi knew, without words, what was wrong: the girl despaired, feeling the _otherness_ that had marked their line, and being old enough now to feel it, old enough others would remark upon it. She, too, missed Jedha, though of course she had never been there and likely never would be. Shmi ran her hands down the girl’s back in comfort and tried to alert the girl’s mother — for now both ghosts knew the little girl would never remember her _true_ mother, just as Shmi would never know her eternal companion’s name — that the child needed comforting. Though the girl showed no sign of having felt her touch, she still quieted her mourning.

And then she was gone, once more, until the girl, again, needed her; she appeared, and pulled her arms around the girl, as she cried in the bathroom after a friend had snapped at her. Shmi urged the girl to calm herself, to consider Leia, while rubbing her back. Her unseen companion bent forward, rubbing the girl’s cheek, still, after all these years, praying the girl would notice.

And then the girl came in, the girls making up, and they once again vanished, their job done.

And so it was, for so many years.

—

When her granddaughter was nineteen, and just barely a woman, they saw Anakin again.

He was horrible in every way; encased in black, loathsome, in so much pain she felt it, even dead. She loved him still, and sent him her love. Her eternal companion reached out to touch the hem of his cloak as he swept into Leia’s room, and they both wept with the girl when he left, their cries silent but no less sorrowful.

Shmi reached out into the force; she had learned more in how to manipulate it dead than she ever had living, and so was able, for the first time, to touch Anakin’s mind, to convince Anakin that the girl — his daughter, his _unknown daughter_ — must survive. She could not tell him that she was _his_ , any more than she could tell him that they were there, but she could suggest that the girl was important, that the girl be kept alive.

And he listened. Bless him, Anakin, after all this time, he still _listened_. He fought for the girl, not understanding why, visited her and stared at the frightened child as his wife, unknown, embraced him, and his mother, unseen, guided him.

But he was but one man. And there were many here, most of them awash in the stink of evil.

When one had the particularly heinous idea to blow up the girl’s home planet, mother and grandmother alike gasped at the depraved nature of the suggestion. Shmi tried to reach into the man's devious mind and swipe the ugly thought away but it was too closed to her; tried to tap Ani’s but he misunderstood it, only holding the girl by the shoulder in cold comfort.

And so Shmi and her companion gave the girl their strength; her mother placed her hand on top of Anakin’s and Shmi felt her send her love; Shmi embraced both son and granddaughter and willed them to make it through this crucible alive.

The pain of Alderaan being blown up was indescribable, even to the dead. Her unknown companion blanched and Shmi sobbed in pain, though none but her eternal companion could hear it.

But still, their girl did not cry.

Ghosts appeared around them on the bridge; the girl’s friends, and her family, and her subjects, and visitors, and all who had once touched the high mountains and wide seas of Alderaan. Even Bail and Breha, who Shmi had sent to help the girl so often, stood before her and she nodded toward Leia. They were cold now, wraiths, like her eternal friend; Shmi knew they would not be able to speak again. 

 _Lend her your strength_ , she said, without words. Luminous spirits needed not such things, those who could touch the force. _She needs us._

And they did. Bail took a step forward and embraced the girl with shadow arms Leia could not see. Breha grabbed her hand, as Shmi and her unknown companion held her shoulders.

They would make sure their girl would make it through.

Leia Organa was led back to her cell, and thousands of ghosts trailed in her wake.

 


End file.
